by WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
D. Appleton and Company, New York. 320 pages.
“This isn’t an English-Indian story. It’s a story of all the world.“
CW: murder/massacre, animal (horse) death, war
Fresh from Los Angeles to New York to work independently as a writer, nineteen-year-old Pandora “Pidge” Musser enters a rooming house on 54 Harrow Street in New York’s Greenwich Village. The owner is the calm and experienced figure of Miss Claes, an Indian-American who takes the role of a mentor figure to Pidge. Others who take residence in the building are Nagar or Mr. Naidu and the novel’s deuteragonist, Richard “Dicky” Cobden.
Nagar is a writer and Hindu friend of Miss Claes. He presents his story, “The Little Man” to The Public Square, which enthralls the weekly paper’s reader-editor Dicky with its narrative of Gandhi. Dicky leaves his wealthy home on East 50th Street to join the others at Harrow. There, he believes he’ll find enough inspiration among the artist-types to write his magnum opus. World War I and the Indian nationalist movement later take roles to awaken the role of empathy and truth in journalism.
Comfort does not attempt to hide from the reader that the conclusive destination for his protagonists is with each other—although he keeps a romantic relationship uncertain. Pidge and Dicky’s lives are intertwined from the moment they meet. Both look for writerly inspiration in the village, find mentorship in Harrow’s Indian-American residents, and seek a greater understanding of the world than their youth experience had given them at the start.
Only Dicky as the power to change her. He rejects her novel manuscript for being too shallow and untruthful—this is the one impetus that motivates Pidge to alter herself. She sets her writing aside, confronts the naivety of her novel and herself, and vows to mature. In contrast, her other key characteristics, empathy and work ethic, are both developed through her supporting characters but never by them.
In contrast, Dicky is influenced by each character he encounters. Most of those influences are Indian: Nagar’s “Little Man” tale inspires him to write an equivalent story, Miss Claes’ wisdom redirects him after the fallout of his first failed proposal to Pidge, and Gandhi’s comment on marriage reawakens Dicky’s momentarily sidelined love for Pidge. However, these events are ultimately ascribed through Comfort’s narration as influences wrought by Pidge.
Until that point, loves are allowed to tangle. Comfort introduces two additional characters to support his commentary on relationships: Fanny Gallup and Rufus Melton. Fanny, the destitute, worldly girl from the Lenox way factory, embodies a woman ruined in her search for love, and Rufus stands as the type of man to cause that ruin through his own selfishness. Pidge deeply pities Fanny with the unstated necessity of a foil: despite witnessing her friend and equal’s destruction by poverty, pregnancy, and unequal love, Pidge’s desperation for comfort drags into the beguiling and stifling arms of Rufus. Irony maintains the drama into the novel’s conclusion.
After all, Dicky proposes to Midge more than once. Each time Dicky attempts to make a lover of her, she refuses. Despite craving comfort, she refuses to allow Dicky to love her by his imaginary ideal of her. The peace a husband’s salary could give her is too easily won for her to accept. She prefers the independence she escaped Los Angeles for–even if it exhausts her and starves her to keep. Yet the past combines with her need for “experiences, life” (107) in Rufus Melton, a man whose self-serving love she attempts to adapt. She never succeeds. Rather, in the same way she did for her father, she adapts to, ignores, and tolerates his presence as she can. Comfort compares the two men directly: “she was lacking in the ability to detach herself from Melton, as from the influence of her father” (93). When she first capitulates to Rufus’ advances, she even blames it on being her “father’s child (134). As her tenderness for Rufus wanes, the narration also comments that “Rufus thought her extremely selfish. So had her father" (157).
Rufus again acts as a foil to her father in the way his character is treated off-scene. Chasing a story, Rufus departs for war-torn France–and is promptly forgotten by the narrative. When he reappears, he is trapped in a new marriage and is potentially shell-shocked. This time, Dicky assists him–but then he is forgotten again. His looming absence does not have the same power over Midge as her father did, yet even her father’s power wanes as Pidge matures: when he falls ill and Pidge rushes to him, she “suddenly discovered she had a father” (221) as though she had forgotten him.
To an extent, the actions Midge and Dicky share by caring for Rufus and Adolf Musser convey their unity in life and role. While Dicky is away chasing stories in India and France, Pidge has taken his place in The Public Square as reader-editor. This constant mirroring reinforces Comfort’s intention to wrap them into deeper connection than romantic love. For Comfort, they are not lovers but comrades.
When rejecting Dicky’s proposal a second time, Pidge states:
“Do I have to begin by saying how dear you are—how kind, how utterly good it is to know you; what it means to have faith and trust in one man?” “Please not, Pidge.” “But never forget it, Dicky. It’s the pedestal upon which everything’s builded. Always remember that I know you underneath; that I turn to you in trouble—not like a brother or father or lover, but what our word comrade means—what it will sometime mean to many people!“ (106)
The word "comrade” relates to Comfort’s social theory in his Will Levington Comfort Letters (1920). He dedicated the volume of letters “To The Comrades,” referring to his compatriots in the spiritual sect he headed called The Glass Hive. In the first letter, he states that “We should belong to one another better in the Long Road sense, in the sense of the real meaning of the word Comrade” (WLC Letters, 2). The second letter clarifies that his purpose in the volume is “to touch the real Comrade within you, for I have an Immortal Friend there, one who would die for me every day” (WLC Letters, 8). The theory of the Comrade may not, of course, derive exclusively from Comfort’s spiritual leanings, but also may be seen as a more heterosexual or multi-racial expansion of Walt Whitman’s comradeship theory.
Dicky and Pidge are not complete comrades with their respective mentors, Nagar and Miss Claes, but their use of journalism to depict the Indian nationalist conflict which the latter two are entrenched in forms a key component of their bond.
During Pidge’s second refusal of Dicky’s proposal, she states, "Miss Claes and Nagar lose themselves in nations. You’re getting to be like them" (107). Furthermore, Dicky’s development moves in tandem with that of India throughout the climax, which Comfort summarizes as “there had been death and birth for India and for himself” (283).
In particular, Comfort references “The Rowlatt Bills,” likely referring to the “Black Bills” which preceded the Rowlatt Act. Introduced March 18, 1919, this act allowed the government to arrest and incarcerate without trial anyone on grounds of inciting terrorism in support of the Indian nationalism. Dicky arrives in late May to reunite with Gandhi and understand the position of “The Little Man” in international politics. The pacing swiftly moves onto April, where Dicky is nearby the arrest of Dr. Satyapal and Dr. Kitchlew–public figures who campaigned against the Rowlatt Act and who, being Hindu and Muslim respectively, promoted unity. The resulting Jallianwala Bagh massacre also receives full coverage.
I adore this excerpt from the Jallianwala Bagh scene. Dicky confronts General Fyatt (Reginald Dyer) at the head of the massacre:
Dicky felt the horrible slowness over everything—that somehow there was not in this man’s volition the power to order the firing to cease. No recognition showed in Fyatt’s eyes. He stared. It was like the man who had stared at him on the docks in Bombay, when he heard that America had entered the War. “I only wanted to ask —” Dicky stopped and raised his voice above the tumult of shots and voices. “Cobden of New York—saw you in France!’’ […] “Ah, Cobden. Heard you were in town. Busy, you know!” “I see!” the American yelled back. He felt like a maniac. “I see! I merely wanted to ask, General, if you had gone mad—or have I?” (277-8)
Comfort’s description style of the massacre closely resembles his techniques to describing the trauma of the World War I Eastern Front in Red Fleece (1915). His sentences are fragmented and disorderly, and smooth comprehension is abandoned for the narrator’s uncertainty. Another mirror in his combat writing is through specters. Dicky notes feeling as though Pidge were with him through his transformation into a “world citizen” (292). Despite recognizing the absurdity of it, he allows himself to find comfort in her imagined presence–and he notes that “things of this kind had often happened to soldiers on the battlefields of France” (285). The phrase has merit in Comfort’s experience and in others. Sassoon (Sassoon, 68) and Bird (Bird, 38), for example, describe seeing loved ones in moments of extreme war stress. Twice the protagonist in Red Fleece impossibly senses his love nearby: “he fancied her near…” (Red Fleece, 134) and “she had been near” (Red Fleece, 148).
Still–not wishing to distract from the novel’s theme towards India–Comfort spends a brief time in World War I France and Arabia “with young Tom Lawrence, whose fame Dicky Cobden helped to make” (137). The French portion receives a short chapter set near the Meuse–Argonne offensive (“The ‘Oregon’ forest,” 197) which contains a passage I found memorable:
His mount had turned gently away in the thickening dusk, turned on his toe corks through the slush to follow a wind-blown leaf. Plop — a water-soaked trench-siding gave way, and Yorick disappeared into an unused pit. […] Yorick looked like a monster in the process of being born out of the mud. There was something both humorous and hopeless about the gaunt lifted head that came up into the ray. And now Dicky discovered that Yorick’s left foreleg below the knee veered off suddenly to the left, at a decided angle from the way it should lie. Dicky felt alone in a harrowing underworld. […] “Pretty lucky old boy, you are,” Dicky said. “Work done, war over for you, nice warm ditch to lie up in at the last, and I’ve got to take all the responsibility.” He drew the pistol from his belt and placed it on the little twist of hair halfway between the eyes. “I ought to take the saddle off first, but I’m not going to. So long, old kid, and best luck.” The pistol banged in the dugout like a cannon cracker under a flower pot, and the voice of an American sentry above was heard to say: ‘‘Some fool’s blowed his head off, down there. Why in hell can’t a man be patient!”
Although not a complete surprise coming from Comfort’s strong anti-war background, the novel references support for the pacifist movement. John Higgans, the Public Square’s editor, wrote a pacifist article in outrage of his conscientious objector friend’s arrest. Despite knowing it would doom the Public Square, Higgans resolves publish the article. Pidge convinces him against it. He cedes ownership of the paper to her and Dicky. Thus, despite its feature on little more than a page, the pacifist scene contributes to the novel’s imaginary future story: the tale of the press in the hands of Pidge and Dicky.
But the Public Square is not the ultimate point of the novel. Neither is Pidge–which weakens the novel’s impact after spending so much time wither her. Dicky is key. The value of the story is in his transformation but even that is muddled toward the end.
Even after every change India and Indian culture has wrought in Dicky, he concludes though the trauma specter of Pidge that it was her influence that matured him. He goes so far as to say “The Little Man has made me see […] the great thing you have done […] pushing me back into myself” (292-3). By relegating Gandhi–and India in extension–to a supportive role for Pidge, the novel completely undermines the strength of Dicky’s world citizenship. All his work towards his journalism–watching Nagar be whipped, drilling himself to avoid partisanship, neglecting his family for India–is abandoned which he declares that his journey has been “at last to become connected to her this way, though across the world" (286).
Furthermore, Pidge’s role as a comrade is reversed from an equal partner with individual goals to a person to “the man-maker a wife must be” (292). While the novel’s final pages do not state explicit romance, the intention is obvious: Pidge is to be divorced from Rufus, she confesses that she is “dying to be a woman” (318), and she repeatedly asks Dicky for rest–the thing he offered her in his original proposal.
This conclusion brings a novel with a sustained direction to a contradictory end. When Comfort declares that “This isn’t an English-Indian story. It’s a story of all the world” (281), he sweeps narrative and personal experience together. When his characters seek narrative and journalistic truth in the tragic root of revolutions, they emerge with a closer relationship to each other than to international concerns. Romantic love, once asserted as a controlling yet lesser impulse, marks the resolution of Midge and Dicky’s stories rather than the careers they sought together. The Public Square has a future under the direction of its former reader-editors, but it may lack complete conviction.
This essay revised from an original post published December 30, 2020.
Bird, Will R. Ghosts Have Warm Hands. Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited, 1968.
Levington Comfort, Will. The Public Square. D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1923.
---. Red Fleece. George H. Doran Company, New York, 1915.
---. The Will Levington Comfort Letters. 4993 Pasadena Avenue, Los Angeles, 1920.
Sassoon, Siegfried. Siegfried Sassoon Diaries, 1915-1918. Faber & Faber, 1983.
The Public Square dust cover from Yesterday’s Gallery.
Everybody’s Magazine Mar 1923 image, page 105 by C. R. Chickering.
Everybody’s Magazine Apr 1923 image, page 155 by C. R. Chickering.
Everybody’s Magazine May 1923 image, page 149 by C. R. Chickering.
Comments